The distinction Emerson detects in the Gītā between the “paths” of morals and gnosis enables him, amidst direct citations of the text, to call for a transcendence of the false and self-interested ego in favor of the “pure, luminous…Spirit (that) is distinct from the body.”41 Emerson did not accept the literal implications of the doctrine of rebirth and understands the idea of karma as what he calls “beautiful necessity,” the soul’s deserts for its deeds, and “fate,” which represents all the limiting conditions of human life.42 He then clarifies that the path of gnosis is superior to that of action precisely because, in spiritual consummation, “intellect” overcomes “will.”43 In various writings of the 1850s such as the essay “Illusions” and Representative Men, Emerson continues to occasionally invoke the Upaniṣads and the Gītā in his insistence that the accreted ego is not only the source of desires but is so out of its artificial distinction between self and other, a distinction that is ultimately “illusion” in comparison to the “fundamental unity” that is revealed in both neo-Platonic and Indian texts. He rarely brings these insights to bear on his overt critiques of American materialism in his published works. He is more given, however, to acknowledging his indebtedness to Asian thought when it comes to particular articulations of moral and spiritual ideals. It is in the Indian texts, as Emerson observes and thematizes in 1861, that the individual self (ātman) is linked to the “Over-Soul” (paramātman), where “Over-Soul” does indeed serve as a rough “assimilation” of the latter Sanskrit term into the conceptual environment of other neo-Platonic and Christian ideas.44 This continued insistence, which is pervasive in Emerson’s journals and public statements from the 1850s to the 1870s, 1870 that the ego, and sometimes even all of nature, should be understood as māyā does appear to clearly distinguish his thought from the alternative English Romantic and American individualist glorification of the ego.45 This makes Emerson’s appropriation of Indian thought unique in the nineteenth century in an important way, for that appropriation is not, like Schopenhauer’s, indebted to Romantic intellectual influences.
Though Emerson found much in the Indian tradition to inform his thought on morals, for instance in the Laws of Manu and the Gītā, Confucian texts tended to offer only moral insights rather than mystical ones. It would appear from many of his speeches and transcribed notes that Emerson was particularly appreciative of the Confucian conceptions of the “golden mean” and people’s continuing social duties to one another as a counterweight to the inclinations he saw in men such as Alcott and Thoreau to find solace from the widespread moral decay of modern society in nature.46 In other late essays such as “Spiritual Laws,” “Character,” and “Manners,” the voice of Mencius was added to that of Confucius in support of such ongoing social commitments.
It is a hermeneutical truism that a reader’s attraction to various strands of thought, particularly if those strands of thought come from different eras and cultures, will be in part determined by the circumstances of the times in which the reader lives and strongly affected by the many layers of interpretation that mediate those ancient traditions to the present. Emerson is hardly an exception to this rule, for his reception of classical Indian and Chinese philosophical and religious ideas arises out of preexisting frameworks of Christian and neo-Platonic thought, occupies its degree of importance in the context of his diagnoses of and insights into nineteenth-century American culture and is filtered through the Orientalist sources from which he imbibes them. His synthetic and universalist inclinations, which strive to extract religious ideas from their historical, dogmatic, and ritual strictures and apply them to all human beings are the framework for what he finds inspirational in Indian and Chinese antiquity. But these very frameworks are also what enable Emerson to claim to have made what he drew from Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian thought into “mine Asia.”
36.6 NIETZSCHE
The pendulum of nineteenth-century Western readings of Asian thought swings back in the other direction in the works of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s early discipleship to and then rejection of Schopenhauer’s thought in the late 1860s and early 1870s in many respects would come to permanently shape his reception of classical Hindu and Buddhist thought. From his 1872 publication of The Birth of Tragedy all the way to his writings of the late 1880s, 1880 Nietzsche dedicated much of his reflection to formulating a way to overcome Schopenhauer’s “pessimism” and arrive at a great affirmation of life and the world. The fact that Schopenhauer believed Vedānta and Buddhism to have been such laudable expressions of “pessimism” and “denial of the will to live,” and Nietzsche’s basic acceptance of Schopenhauer’s and Paul Deussen’s representations of these traditions, made many of Nietzsche’s own assessments of Hindu and Buddhist thought predictable. But the mere depiction of Vedānta and Buddhism as “nihilistic” and “pessimistic” was expanded into a broader historical and cultural critique in Nietzsche’s late works, which often depicted Buddhism in particular as at once a more honest and mature brand of nihilism than Christianity which “Europe” might on the one hand have to pass through but on the other hand must, because of its great danger to life, quickly dispense with. His exposure to classical Indian traditions therefore does not influence Nietzsche’s philosophy, in contrast to the cases of Schopenhauer and Emerson, but it does provide him one springboard off of which he can create a dramatic narrative of both his own thinking and his prognosis for the destiny of his own culture.
Nietzsche’s earliest exposure to Indian epic literature may have occurred either in or in connection with classes he took in the 1850s at the philology institute in Schulpforta.47 In his correspondence with former Schulpforta classmate Deussen in the 1870s and 1880s, 1880 Nietzsche expresses early interest in studying Indian philosophy further, but upon reception of Deussen’s book on Vedānta in 1883, Nietzsche tersely remarks that he expects to find in it an expression of “no” to life that roughly matches the eloquence with which his own writings say “yes” to it. Only one title on Buddhism by Hermann Oldenberg can be found in Nietzsche’s library.48 He sparingly cites ancient Indian religious texts in his early works, but is more often given to extended reflection on his assessments of the larger cultural meaning and value of texts like the Laws of Manu and Theravāda Buddhist thought in general, and it is these latter that are most meaningful for exploring his stances toward Asian philosophy.
In his late writings and notes, Nietzsche finds an object of admiration in the portrayals of the priestly and warrior classes in the Laws of Manu, for they represent in this text for him an unmitigated affirmation of their own character and status that assertively disregards the values of the “herd.” Their unrestrained praise of their own nobility presumably washes over the reader with pleasant feelings.49 Nietzsche qualifies this in the immediate sense by adding that this self-assertion of the upper classes of the caste system is based through and through on “lies” that are sanctified under the rubrics of manufactured religious holiness.50 It must also be remembered that, in the larger framework of Nietzsche’s genealogical construal of the transformation of values in history, such self-assertion should in contemporary Europe not be a privilege of priests and warriors but should instead be claimed by the creative individual. In any event, that Nietzsche found a model of life-affirmation as he understood it within the Hindu tradition should not escape notice, particularly in view of the more predominant focus on “life-denial” he locates in Buddhism.
Even in the context of his overall evaluation of the tradition, Nietzsche has high praise for a number of what he takes to be core convictions of Buddhism. Buddhists do not seek solace from the pain of life in any divine being, and their rejection of a conception of God from the start reveals how “honest,” “clear-eyed,” and “objective” they are.51 Furthermore, even though they appear to Nietzsche to be “overly sensitive to pain” and “tender,” they are able to face the world and others without ressentiment, which again for him indicates that they are more historically and existentially mature t
han the contemporary Christians of Europe.52 Such untraumatized acceptance of truths of nature and life make of Buddhism a “perfected pessimism,” and its mastery, so to speak, of nihilism sometimes causes Nietzsche to muse in his notes that he himself could be thought of as the “Buddha of Europe.”53
Perhaps through his cursory readings and his correspondence with Deussen and appreciation of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche was certainly aware that ancient Indian systems like Vedānta and Buddhism were gaining a European audience, and despite musings and positive appraisals like those already mentioned, he was not at all sanguine about the possibility of a “European Buddhism.” After all, returning to his basic genealogical framework, Buddhists, in their pursuit of nirvāṇa, are saying their great “no” to life and turning away from the world. Buddhism is therefore, in conjunction with the spirit of Christianity and Schopenhauer, everything that Nietzsche believes individuals and culture should overcome. Its overarching negativity may be useful in bringing its opposite into relief, that being a joyful embrace of life even with all of its suffering.54 But even should Buddhism gain a foothold in Europe, it is an “inert” impetus, and will be unable to exhibit the strength that the newfound “will to power” which Nietzsche heralds as the basis of both the workings of nature and human striving, as well as the coming “reevaluation of all values,” will offer to civilization.55
Suspicions, suggestions, and whole studies from Nietzsche’s own contemporaries to the present have been given to comparative speculations that, despite Nietzsche’s relative ignorance of and guardedness against Asian philosophies of various kinds, there are deeper resonances between his own ideas and the supposedly anti-epistemological, anti-metaphysical, and even anti-moral directions of thought in ancient Vedānta, Buddhism, and Daoism. Nietzsche himself, however, does not seem to have had much interest in detailed study of the materials which by the late nineteenth century could have given him more access to these classical intellectual movements.56 He instead was far more fixated on the possible cultural implications for Europe of a widening interest in Indian philosophy. And, despite his acknowledgment that some forms of historically life-affirming traditions could be found in Hinduism, not only were these forms not fit for the present stage of human development, the intermediate stage between Mensch and Übermensch, but what Buddhism and its growing popularity represented for Nietzsche was a vital threat to the immanent need for human civilization to slough off its world-renouncing religions and embrace a new spirituality that would, as he famously put it in Zarathustra, pronounce the only sins as “sins against the earth.”
36.7 CONCLUSION
Like the preceding two or three centuries of varied Western religious, intellectual, and political encounters with South and East Asian civilizations, the nineteenth century’s receptions of classical Asian traditions of thought undulated between openness and self-preoccupation, between receptivity and rejection, not only among different thinkers, but also within the works of each individually. Asia was initially presented to nineteenth-century Western philosophers through the scholarship of mostly Western missionaries and Orientalists amid the fervor of Continental and English Romantic yearnings for “original” spiritual inspiration from ancient cultures which supposedly had evolved into their own. For nineteenth century Western philosophers, what they learned about Indian and Chinese thought challenged Enlightenment conceptions of the self and reason, provoked them to rethink received metaphysical models of the natural order and faced them with the always fraught confrontation with the “other” to their own cultures. And yet, each major thinker dealt with these challenges in their own creative ways. Hegel castigated the “superficiality” of Indiana and Chinese “substance” metaphysics and dismissed their “pre-philosophical” character. Emerson was devoted to their disclosure of a grand “unity” and call to a reawakening to the “Over-Soul” that made them the equals of Platonism and Christianity. Schopenhauer celebrated the metaphysical “pessimism” and ethical compassion of Indian thought that would spark a new European “Renaissance.” Nietzsche dedicated himself to overcoming this very pessimism and resisted the onset of a “European Buddhism.” The contours of each thinker’s grappling with Asian thought interact and collide. And their receptions would in turn lay down a path for their twentieth-century successors to tread, from Josiah Royce’s direct studies of early Sanskrit texts to Husserl’s vaguely Hegelian rejection of Asian thought as not belonging to any proper history of philosophy to Heidegger’s ambivalent but provocative intrigue especially for East Asian languages and art.
We find ourselves presently in an academic environment of progressively more specialized and professionalized study of South and East Asian philosophy in the West accompanied by active dialogue with representatives of these traditions from around the world. To some, these newer and hermeneutically more sensitive approaches seem to relegate nineteenth-century Western ponderings of Asian philosophies to the confines of sheer intellectual history. But at least one most profound legacy of those nineteenth-century ponderings remains. Whether their respective responses were receptive and assimilating or rejecting and resistant, nineteenth-century Western thinkers did not read the renditions of classical Asian philosophy with a merely detached brand of aloofness, nor did any of them feign some sort of hermeneutic neutrality that could threaten precisely to prevent them from having something at philosophical stake in their engagement with these traditions. For however manifestly limited and imperfect their understandings of South and East Asian thought were and however correspondingly fair or unfair their assessments of their ideas may have been, for these major philosophers of the nineteenth century, classical Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist philosophy mattered to their worldviews and thus had to be reckoned with in the most serious ways. One can only hope that at least this legacy will not be lost upon the Western philosophers who come after them.
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1 Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (SUNY Press, Albany, 1988), 76. (Hereafter IE)
2 Friedrich Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. In Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 8, E. Behler and U. Struc-Oppenberg eds. (Schöningh, Paderborn, 1976), 209, 199.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 135